Linked Together

Some years ago, it was evident that LinkedIn was changing. In part, because the system is flexible enough for people to approach it from a number of different directions.

The problem isn't that traditional LinkedIn also has to make room for Linktagram, FacedIn, SnapLink, WhatsIn and LinkTok. It's that these might not be equally valuable to everyone, but there's no way to focus on the experience one wants. For me, LinkedIn takes all of these different ways of interacting, puts them through a paint shaker and dumps them out on me as an undifferentiated mess. So I have to do the work to sort through my feed to find what might be of value to me, when some really simple features would make that much, much, easier.

As it is now, they compete. And as more people move to one mode or another, that mode can come to dominate people's feeds, even if it not that useful for them. I had been able to stem the tide somewhat with aggressive use of the Mute feature, but since that was deprecated, I've had to start unfollowing people to manage things. Which is an unsatisfactory solution.

The late, lamented, Google+ (well, I lament its passing) had, for a time, a nice functionality called Circles. Circles allowed user to group their contacts into buckets, and then send posts to those individual buckets. So I could create a Gaming circle, for instance, and my posts about Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop games could be aimed to those people I knew would be interested. Here on LinkedIn, when I look at my Activity, it's broken down into Posts, Comments, Images and Reactions. While LinkedIn has created an algorithmic recommendation engine of posts it thinks I might light, I find it difficult to keep up with posts from my connections. Being able to see, for instance, just the posts of my first-level contacts from time to time would make the platform more useful in that regard

This won't solve everything. There are always going to be people who feel that they're doing me (and themselves) a favor by manipulating things to get something in front of me in spite of my active disinterest in it. But if LinkedIn can find a way to make it easier for people to experience the site on their own terms, they'll be on to something.